‘Tis the season for festive decorations! Taken from this month's Make & Take: Craft with Style program, learn how to craft your own pompoms with our tutorials, and spruce up your holiday gift wrapping or décor!

The Cleveland Museum of Art's latest acquisitions include a Virgin and Child, a rare 13th-century wooden sculpture from the Mosan region of Europe; a Standing Female Figure, a clay figure representative of the Classic Veracruz period on Mexico’s Gulf Coast; and Just the two of us, one of contemporary artist Julia Wachtel’s first paintings to employ cartoons. The museum also announced the addition of eight photographs by Ansel Adams, a gift from Frances P. Taft, a longtime museum supporter and trustee.

"[Dora Maar] was one of Picasso’s best-known mistresses…but she was much more," said art collector and filmmaker David Raymond, whose once-beloved photograph are now owned and on view at the Cleveland Museum of Art as part of the exhibition, Forbidden Games: Surrealist and Modernist Photography. Since acquiring the collection, the CMA now boasts the largest grouping of photographs by Maar in the United States - and one of the largest in the world. Learn more in this video interview with Raymond and photo historian Ian Walker today, November 22 - Dora Maar's birthday.

One of the most exciting young ensembles in chamber music today, the Calder Quartet return to Cleveland for the first in an ongoing series of performances in the Transformer Station beginning Wednesday, November 19. Called “outstanding” and “superb” by the New York Times, the quartet perform a broad range of repertoire at an exceptional level.

As one of the great American modern artists, Jacob Lawrence (1917–2000) brought to life important historical events and contemporary scenes through a striking style of elemental forms and expressive colors. Among his notable achievements are works in extended series tackling heroic stories and themes. The first of these monumental efforts, The Life of Toussaint L’Ouverture, is showcased this fall in our prints and drawings gallery through January 4, 2015.

Composer John Luther Adams was in Cleveland in September 2014 for a short residency that included presenting two of his major non-concert hall works: Inuksuit, for 99 percussionists, was performed in the Lake View Cemetery on an unexpectedly gorgeous early autumn day; and Veils and Vesper, a ten-channel immersive sound environment, was installed at St. John's in the Ohio City neighborhood. In this video clip , Adams talks about the process behind his "most rigorously mathematic and most unabashedly sensuous piece," as well as the importance of the surrounding environment to the experience of the installation.

On October 25, 1881, artist Pablo Picasso was born in Spain. In honor of his birthday, we take a closer look at one of the Cleveland Museum of Art's most significant works by the artist, La Vie, on view now.

On the heels of the museum's annual Performing Arts series kick off, we sat down with Tom Welsh, Director of Performing Arts at the Cleveland Museum of Art, to talk more about the artists performing this year.